“Fathers, do not rebuke your sons lest they become disheartened,” Paul writes in his letter to the young Christian community at Ephesus (modern-day Turkey). The wisdom of Paul’s words has been brought home with great force, but even greater sadness, by the allegations of years of violent sexual abuse reported in The Weekend Australian by Adelaide-based Archbishop John Hepworth of the Traditional Anglican Communion.
By Archbishop Hepworth’s account of his time as a naive teenage Catholic seminarian in Adelaide’s St Francis Xavier Seminary, he was repeatedly suborned, groomed and blackmailed by some fellow seminarians and clergy for homosexual sex, then threatened with expulsion including by one bishop if he made formal accusations. The abuse reportedly continued after ordination, by which time the clerical predators would have held a psychologically vulnerable victim in thrall. According to Archbishop Hepworth, the archbishop of the time simply told him to leave the archbishop’s office when he tried to reveal what had happened to him.
Now the allegations have been made very public, receiving worldwide coverage, Australian Catholics must countenance three possibilities: Archbishop Hepworth is delusional, a liar, or telling the truth.
By his account, from the time he entered the seminary in 1961 he unwittingly entered a living hell. The abuse was compounded by the cold rejection of his attempts to report it to superiors. A picture is painted of a predatory homosexual subculture within the archdiocese and official ineptitude and mismanagement responding to it.
A disturbing aspect of the whole issue, on the basis of what is known about other cases, is that he was unlikely to have been the only victim of those he names, that in all probability victims were not just junior clerics but also parishioners and their families – the baptised. An immediate, full and thorough investigation is now needed.
It is not insignificant that Archbishop Hepworth says his impulse to seek resolution with the Catholic Church was motivated by, among others, an Anglican woman. It was, after all, to women that the news of the resurrection was first given.
Nor is the abuse he recalls and credits with his decision to flee the Catholic Church just a problem of the past, if the allegations reported in The Weekend Australian are accurate – and one might expect the newspaper to have made a rigorous assessment of the credibility of his claims regarding the Adelaide archdiocese’s response to his complaints, beginning in 2007.
Questions must naturally arise as to why the archdiocese’s investigation, including into a priest still serving in the archdiocese, is still at a “preliminary” stage after nearly five years. By contrast, an investigation by the Archdiocese of Melbourne into Archbishop Hepworth’s allegations against one priest, now dead, were swiftly resolved in little more than a year by a highly regarded Queen’s Counsel, resulting in compensation of $75,000 and an official and heartfelt apology from Archbishop Dennis Hart.
The Adelaide archdiocese’s response is that Archbishop Hepworth never formalised his complaint until earlier this year. Its investigation, it says, is more complicated because the accused priest in its jurisdiction is still alive and serving, but is now proceeding and close to finalisation. Archbishop Hepworth, for his part, has said he was always under the impression his detailed written statements in 2008 constituted a formal complaint and were being investigated.
Even if Archbishop Hepworth is wrong, is the Adelaide archdiocese’s approach justified? Do all complaints not explicitly made formal result in zero investigation? In light of the past decade or so, this is perhaps the most amazing revelation to come out of this sorry affair.
Survivors of sexual abuse, whether at the hands of Catholic personnel or those in society at large, can be understandably disheartened at what might be interpreted as a lack of zeal to ensure the protection of others. Despite the archdiocese’s statement that its officials and lawyers repeatedly encouraged Archbishop Hepworth to report his complaint to the police – a complaint the archdiocese says is “very complicated” to investigate given the events occurred almost 50 years ago – its own response could appear discouraging to anyone who has been abused. What are victims to think?
The Church is full of good men who have heard a unique call in their hearts to proclaim the truth of Jesus Christ crucified, dead and risen from death. The position of priests, extremely difficult since the sexual abuse scandals first broke, has just been made harder. It is not only the victims who suffer, but the whole Church. This episode can only lend weight to those critics who charge that elements of the Church are not really serious about reconciliation with the victims of abuse. If ever there was a time to say it, it is now: serious, detailed, believable allegations of abuse that extend to a culture within the Church should never, ever be ignored.